121–126 of 126 posts
Hear, hear! :) I'm really happy to see this get to the front page. But why pixels (px) and not points (pt)? I made a site using 12pt text and it looks good everywhere (ipad, iphone, chromebook, linux, windows, mac). I suspect 16px is going to look too small on a Retina Macbook (I don't own one, so I wouldn't know).
It's great to see this on HN where there are literally fonts as low as 7pt being used... Everyone keeps saying that it's fine as long as zoom functions correctly. Well it's also fine to use a font size widely accepted as readable. 7pt? Really? Why? Because zoom works? I know a lot of people who read HN that use style bot to increase the font size. To act like this isn't an issue seems really weird to me. Ctrl+- is th…
The price paid is that sometimes a poorly designed site has text that spills out of a fixed-size box, but I can cope with that much more easily than with trying to read something that is 7px tall.
On the other hand, don't use font sizes that are too big (I've noticed that on a number of blogs and startup sites recently). It might look great on your large iMac screen, but when I read it with an 11" MBA, it's pretty frustrating to only be able to see a handful of lines of text at the same time. Even this blog which is doing the complaining, I wish I could see more of the text at the same time. Though it's a matt…
How wide is your screen (in px)? Because the max width of my layout is around the old 760px standard. You should be able to see everything (even if, as you say, it's a bit too large). On the other hand, it's a pretty valid critique. To be honest I forgot that there are 11 inch screens (or, screens that are larger than phones but smaller than 17inch desktop monitors). I'm not on any sort of a big screen. And indeed, m…
I had hopes that all these different resolutions/DPIs/sizes for screens would stop designers trying to force a pixel-perfect layout into a browser, but the end result seems to have just been "CSS media queries".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that low contrast sucks. I also agree that breaking zoom is a silly thing for designers to do. But small font sizes, and expecting the average user to know that they can zoom, is wrong. All three are symptoms of a bigger problem - some designers are either ignorant about usable design, or just don't care about a significant portion of users.
> expecting the average user to know that they can zoom I'm all for never overestimating the technical literacy of one's users, but .. really? The average person doesn't even know they CAN zoom? That seems an "ignoratum too far", like not knowing they can alter the volume on their stereo. Touch screen devices make it ridiculously easy, too. Surely the average user has worked out by now that they can change the size o…
I don't mind small font sizes as long as you don't do anything to break zoom in the browser. What is killing me a lot more lately is the trend towards extremely low contrast sites, like white backgrounds with almost-white text. This is starting to be everywhere recently and it is horrible. I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor, designer, but on mine I can barely even see there are words…
I agree that low contrast sucks. I also agree that breaking zoom is a silly thing for designers to do. But small font sizes, and expecting the average user to know that they can zoom, is wrong. All three are symptoms of a bigger problem - some designers are either ignorant about usable design, or just don't care about a significant portion of users.